Mankind has been terraforming Mars, knowing the Earth won’t be livable for long. Yes, pre-Elon Musk, this was a movie. 

When the air levels start to go wrong, Mars-1 is sent to investigate. The team includes Mission Commander Kate Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss), co-pilot Ted Santen (Benjamin Bratt), science officer Bud Chantilas (Terence Stamp), mechanical systems engineer Robby Gallagher (Val Kilmer), bioengineer Quinn Burchenal (Tom Sizemore) and terraforming expert Chip Pettengill (Simon Baker). 

On the surface, things start to fall apart. As the group runs out of oxygen, Chantilas is critically injured, Petengill pushes Santen off a cliff, and their robot AMEE is damaged and begins to take them out one by one. But as they learn that they can breathe Mars’ air, perhaps they can find something that can save Earth.

While Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer had been friends, much like the antics on Mars, they soon came to blows. Kilmer was mad that the production had paid for Sizemore’s elliptical machine to be shipped to the set, and he screamed, “I’m making ten million on this. You’re only making two!” Then Sizemore threw a weight at him. Things were so bad that body doubles were used for many of their scenes together. Kilmer reportedly refused to say Sizemore’s character’s name, saying instead, “Hey, you!” Eventually, they fought, and Sizemore would later file a restraining order against Kilmer.

Directed by Antony Hoffman and written by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin, this film — along with The Saint, The Island of Dr. Moreau and a few others — started the idea that Kilmer was box office poison.

The Arrow 4K UHD release of this film includes extras such as interviews with visual effects supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun and helmet and suit designer Steve Johnson; a brand-new visual retrospective with film critic Heath Holland; deleted scenes; and a trailer. It comes inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Griffin with an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Mark A. Altman. You can get it from MVD.

Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett) is psychic. While supernatural films can’t always be giallo, psychic abilities are generally alright, as seen by the inclusion of Fulci’s film of the same name. There are so many rules. Anyway, she mainly uses her powers to help people who have a rougher life than she and her three children, like Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi) and Valerie (Hilary Swank), whose abusive husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves) has threatened Annie’s life after she advises Valerie to leave him. 

Jessica King (Katie Holmes) has disappeared. The fiancée of school principal Wayne Collins (Greg Kinnear), she comes to Annie in a vision, telling her that she’s in a pond on Donnie’s property. The dream or message or whatever you believe is true, as Donnie is soon arrested. That night, Buddy, who has been upset about this murder, keeps trying to connect to Annie, who is overwhelmed by the body being found. He goes home and ties his father to a chair, setting him on fire in return for abusing him as a child.

The visions continue, as Annie believes Donnie is innocent and loved Jessica, with whom he was having an affair. She asks prosecutor David Duncan (Gary Cole) to reopen the case; he refuses, and she reminds him that she knows that he also had an affair with Jessica. This feels like Rome in the 70s, not Georgia; it’s just missing fashion, black gloves, and a better soundtrack. Actually, the Christopher Young score is good, but maybe some Morricone?

So who did it? Can Annie’s powers save her life and find the real killer? Written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson before Sling Blade, Thornton based this on his mother’s real psychic abilities. It’s directed by Sam Raimi, who knows a little bit about suspense. Of course, Annie drives the car that is in every one of Raimi’s films, a Delta 88 Oldsmobile.

Pierce Jackson Dawn (Randal Malone) was one of the greatest make-up artists of the early 20th century. However, his death is quite strange. It came after he wanted to work with horror stars Pratt Borokov (Tim Sullivan) and Janos Blasko (director and writer Ron Ford) for producer Leonard Schein (Wes Deitrick), even if Blasko has overdosed and Borokov must be convinced through death and reanimation to make the movie. Yet instead of acting, they start to kill.

Featuring interview segments with David DeCoteau, Conrad Brooks, silent star Anita Page and former Hollywood starlet Margaret O’Brien, this is basically Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff coming back from the dead to destroy unsuspecting people. For that alone, as well as how it’s shot kind of like a documentary, you have to enjoy it. It’s a low, low, low budget affair, yet when has that stopped a movie from being worthwhile?

If you love old movies and didn’t have any worries about watching movies no matter what format they were shot in, you’re going to love this. If you demand things have an actual budget and not spend time throwing deep cut horror jokes at you, well…

You can watch this on YouTube.

Shout out to Ator Moonbeam. He realized that I was missing this Jess Franco movie and sent me his DVD in the mail. Now, it closes out the second Jess Franctuary.

Maria Beltran (Rachel Sheppard) has become famous for writing Desperate Letters, a book that exposed her corrupt Caribbean homeland of San Hermoso. For some reason, she thinks that it would be a good idea to come home for a book tour despite getting death threats. While there, she meets up with several old lovers, including Beatriz Arenas (Tatiana Cohen), who she has a sapphic encounter with while a hidden camera records things, which the secret police use to blackmail her into doing assassinations for her, in-between Tora (Lina Romay) threatening her with sodomy with a curling iron and showing her the eyeball of her female lover.

Luckily, she has an ex-CIA ex-boyfriend named Leonardo Radek (Roger Pavlovich) who shows up and does capoeira and ninja stuff, killing people primarily by breaking their necks. Was I sad when he breaks Lina’s neck? You know it.

This film also led to Antena Criminal: Making a Jess Franco Movie, which showed what it takes to go to a hotel near the beach and allow Jess Franco to make a political thriller with surf rock, extended travelogue footage, zooms, extraneous lesbian scenes that are essential to the plot because they’re in a Jess Franco movie, dubbing which barely qualifies as the word, more zooms, Lina Romay being deranged and Linnea Quigley showing up just long enough to be top credited on the cover of the DVD yet meaning nothing to the actual film.

This was Franco’s 176th movie and I assume that when the hotel staff was on lunch break, he snuck into a conference room and pushed his zoom lens as far as it would go, filming several women with glitter all over their pubes.

This has some of the wildest—and by that, I mean borderline inept—action scenes in a Franco film, but it is missing things like diamonds, Dr. Orloff and Lina being more featured. In my dreams, this movie was mostly her and Linnea Quigley in a hotel room for three hours, smoking cigarettes while they discuss politics and Jess just goes wild with his camera. I don’t want AI to make movies, but I will accept my computer overlords if it can make that for me.